According to severalreports detailing the activity on Rotten Tomatoes’ The Last Jedi page, it appears someone (or several someones) have utilized an army of bots to spam the film’s audience score with the lowest ratings possible. A Facebook group calling itself “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” has even claimed credit for the disparity between the critics and audience scores, writing in a post, “it was me that caused this”:

“Thanks to friends of mine who taught me a thing or two about Bot Accounts, I used them to create this audience score through Facebook accounts created that subsequently logged into Rotten Tomatoes who rigged this score and still keep it dropping.”

Whether the Facebook group, or the individual behind the above post, is actually responsible for The Last Jedi‘s low Rotten Tomatoes rating cannot be confirmed. According to a survey of all audience-submitted reviews conducted by Polygon, however, several “suspicious similarities” pertaining to the film’s perceived politicized content may connect most of the lowest ratings. (Key phrases like “social justice warrior” or “SJW,” meant as a reference to the movie’s prominent inclusion of women and minority characters, occurred throughout these submissions.)

Plus, there’s the fact that preeminent pollster CinemaScore, which surveys audiences of films on opening night, gave The Last Jedi an “A.” So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lucasfilm

UPDATE (Dec 19, 2017): Fandango Media (the company that owns Rotten Tomatoes) has released a statement addressing the review trend The Last Jedi has experienced.

The authenticity of our critic and user scores is very important to Rotten Tomatoes and as a course of regular business, we have a team of security, network, social and database experts who closely monitor our platforms. They haven’t seen any unusual user activity.

For Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we have seen an uptick in people posting written user reviews, as fans are very passionate about this movie and the franchise. The number of written reviews being posted by fans is comparable to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

This. (I think a lot of critics are kinda hurt their opinions don’t line up with the populace. It’s okay. Different opinions are fine. But there isn’t really any proof to back up this article’s theory – it’s primarily a bit of conjecture – and that’s not cool.)

Note: my response was to the original comment, not this reply. Kinda doesn’t make sense if you aren’t aware of that. Have a great day everyone! Happy Holidays! And remember, the Han Solo movie is less than a year away. Let’s get ready to do all this again!

Anyone can dislike any move they’d like. But when surveys of the actual human beings who viewed the films show a 90% positive rating and the responses submitted electronically through a website show 55%, that vast differential strongly suggests electronic tampering.

I mean, you kinda did get that, though. It’s weird to me that people are perpetuating the narrative of “people complained TFA was too similar and now they’re complaining TLJ was too different,” when TLJ heavily references both Empire and Jedi. That said, none of that retread bothered me, and overall I enjoyed the film, but it could have cut some things like the casino and been a much better movie for it.

As someone who has done their fair share of activism this year the idea that Disney has decided to coopt “resistance” is a shame, but the lazy liberal critics actually swallowing up that shit and giving this movie a pass despite its many cinematic flaws is inexcusable. These are the same DINO fucks that enabled half of Hollywood to commit sexual assault and now they have the audacity to criticize anyone who can smell a shit movie as being somehow politically biased. This isn’t female Ghostbusters sucks because it’s women criticism, this is Last Jedi sucks because it’s not a good movie by any objective measure of storytelling

The only “perfect” SW movie is ESB. All of the other movies have some flaws with the Prequels having many of them. TFA starts of well, lags in the middle, and rises at the end. It’s a good movie. It’s not a great one and it’s not an awful one. Disney is making some choices that I am not happy with, but last I checked they don’t pay my salary.

I liked it, despite some plot holes, I found it entertaining and enjoyable. I thought it was a good movie, not a great Star Wars movie, but a good movie. It didn’t ruin my childhood, because that’s a dumb thing to say and a movie can only ruin the past if you want it to ruin the past.